EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) stores research data and compressed data of less than 1MB up to 100GB in size, with a current dataset of approximately 50PB. Backup and long-term archiving data is written to tape. The previous in-house solution wrote the data from object storage to a disk file system and then to tape media. However, this approach did not provide sufficient performance for the growing data volumes. Moreover only 90% of the tape’s capacity was utilized. With the introduction of PoINT Archival Gateway, the research institute now has a high-performance and cost-effective solution to write data directly to tape via the standardized S3 interface and to cope with the data growth.
Challenge
- Backup and long-term archiving of object data on tape
- Scalability for constantly growing data stocks
- High performance and capacity requirements
Solution - PoINT Archival Gateway
- Standardized S3 interface instead of S3 Glacier commands
- Native tape integration
- Node-based software solution for high scalability and flexibility
Benefits
- Cost efficiency through economical use of hardware
- High-performance and flexible storage solution for backup and archiving
- S3 data stream without hard disk buffer directly to tape
- Hardware and vendor independent